


Farewell

by Marsalias



Series: Dannymay 2019 [2]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Gen, Oneshot, crossposted from ffn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24342829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsalias/pseuds/Marsalias
Summary: It's time for Danny to go.
Series: Dannymay 2019 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757458
Comments: 5
Kudos: 159





	Farewell

They lowered him into the ground and said their goodbyes. He did not say goodbye back. That would have defeated the purpose of the exercise. They already thought he was gone. He wasn't. Just dead, and even that only halfway.

When he was quite sure he was buried (he could no longer hear the backhoe, or the soft, heavy sound of dirt falling on the coffin lid), he opened his eyes. It was dark. Very dark. He didn't mind. He had long been comfortable with darkness.

Besides, the dark didn't much matter when you could glow.

The coffin, he observed once again, was very nice. It was almost too bad he wouldn't be spending more time here, although, he reasoned with a smirk, he could always come back to visit. He sighed, restarting both his breathing and his heart. It was all very well and good not to have any organ function while he was lying nice and still, but he wanted everything working once he started moving around.

In the meantime...

He began to strip away the layers of illusion he had lived under for most of his life. First, ironically, went the sickly pallor of death. Then the wrinkles began to smooth, and his silver hair to fill in and darken. The clouds in his eyes faded, leaving them a perfect sky blue. Deeper things were harder. Shrinking cartiledge, muscles, bones, organs... It was a pain, but nothing he hadn't felt before. Once, he'd had to regrow the entire lower half of his body. Now _that_ had been painful.

Once everything felt right, he pulled a mirror out of his pocket. His will had been very specific about the mirror, and where it should be. No one had remarked on it. His will had been very specific about a lot of things.

When he looked into it, he locked eyes with a faintly luminous fourteen-year-old version of himself. Good. That's what was supposed to happen. It didn't look like he had missed any spots. He was sure he would have felt it of he did, but better to be sure, than to be sorry. The suit was far too big for him now, of course, but there wasn't anything he could do about that.

He took a deep breath. The air was somewhat stale at this point, but it felt like all his organs were working again, so it was time to change. This time, instead of moving from feigned death and old age to a state of youth and vigor, he moved from living to dead.

A bright ring appeared around his waist, split, and traveled up and down his body, leaving changes in its wake. His black formal suit was replaced by HAZMAT, his skin tanned. His eyes went green, his hair white, and his glow intensified.

He dampened the glow. No need for that, really.

In any case, the coffin was now occupied not by a weirdo human, but by an equally strange ghost. He flicked himself out of visibility and tangibility with the ease of long practice, and flew up through the six feet of loose earth on top of his grave.

The funeral was long over, and the sun had set some time ago. No one living lingered. The unliving were a different story, or should be. He spun slowly, looking for things only ghosts and psychics could see.

He spotted them floating under an oak of what he would term exceptional age, and flew towards them. They waved, no more hampered by his invisibility than he was.

"Hi," he said. "I hope I didn't make you wait."

The girl with purple streaks in her dark hair smiled, teeth sharp. "Don't worry about it. We have all the time in the world. It was kind of funny to see you show up late to your own funeral, though."

The other boy, his eyes glowing orange behind thick glasses, nodded. "We always said it would happen."

"There was traffic," the first boy said, aggrieved, "and I wasn't driving."

"Don't worry, little bro," said the second, taller girl, ruffling his hair. Her own, long, teal hair stirred gently in the wind. "It was a nice service, anyway."

"Yeah," said the girl who looked like she could be his twin. Or clone. "You'd probably have been even later if you were driving, being dead and all."

He laughed. "That never stopped us before."

"True."

"But speaking of, why are you all so..." he trailed off, unsure how to phrase the question.

"Come on," said the other boy waving around something small and electronic. "You didn't think we'd let you be the only one running around as a teenager, did you?"

"No," he said, slowly, smiling, "I guess not." He looked up. Stars were showing through the leaves of the tree. "I think it's time to go, now."

"Do you want to do one last patrol around town?" asked his older sister. "For old time's sake?"

"It's not as if we're leaving forever," he said. "We'll be back, and not just to visit." He didn't know if he even could leave this town permanently. He certainly didn't want to.

"But would it be the same?"

"No, I guess it wouldn't. I think- I think I would like to do that, actually," he said, softly.

"So would I," said the girl with dark hair.

"Me too," said his double.

"Reliving the time of our lives? Count me in."

He nodded, swallowing to keep the tears from his eyes, and floated backwards. "Then what are we waiting for? Lets go!"

They first took a wide lap around town, enjoying the boarders where the buildings bled off into trees and farmland, and the river that separated them from their neighboring city. They overflew the schools. First the elementary and middle schools, then the high school. The children who attended them were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who had been their classmates. No one was there at this hour, not even for a football game. They passed by the Nasty Burger, and other restaurants they had frequented as they grew older, all of them busy, stuffed with people, bright with warm light and emotion. They flew _through_ the mall. Invisibly, of course. No need to frighten anyone. Most of the stores were different from the ones that had been there when they were kids, but they were the same _kinds_ of stores. They ghosted through the library, his older sister revisiting her old favorites. They wound through the trees of the park, segueing into a game of hide-and-seek, and then tag. They giggled as they skimmed over the surface of the pond.

Only then did they drift into the residential part of town. They looked in the windows of what once had been their houses, their homes, checking in on their families, their nieces, their nephews, their children, before they started their journey, before they left. But they didn't go in. It wouldn't be fair. They had already said goodbye. In some cases, they had said goodbye long ago.

It was time to move on.

They flew up. The stars above were mirrored by the lights below, glimmering rivers and their celestial rivers. They went up, and up, and up. There was a portal up there. They had been told there would be.

He stopped to look back down on the town, his companions coming to a halt above him.

He sighed. "Goodbye, Amity Park," he murmured. "Farewell for now, but not forever."

They left.


End file.
